Inasmuch as we're experiencing a "wreck" right now, who plunged our societal train into the abyss? As much as the people engaging in all of this want to deny it, eschewing class politics and obsessively embracing dogmatic, incurious, discriminatory identitarian frameworks along with an elitist and censorious attitude has real world effects.
It's unclear exactly what Trump season 2 is going to look like at this point - here's hoping some good things come out of it, but I'll be surprised if on an economic level it doesn't simply continue to tilt us towards the further empowerment of the super wealthy while things get worse for the rest of us - but how did we get here?
Seems to me that people like Ryan have been leading us in this direction for years. Their inability to self reflect and question the social justice ideology that has a hold of them, their unwillingness to examine the world at large as it is (if they ever even have to encounter it) and acknowledge the unintended consequences of the policies and diktats that they've ham fistedly imposed on the rest of us (in large part by terrorizing people into silence with cancel campaigns and convoluted rhetorical tricks) - all of this has managed to capture (and cripple) the Democratic Party to the point that they can't even beat a guy like Trump, who who wouldn't have been a challenging opponent for any party that wasn't deeply out of touch the first time around, and certainly shouldn't have been a problem this time, after he managed to make so many Americans hate him.
From here I wonder: how do we get people who've embraced identitarian social justice out of positions of power in the arts, and in institutions more broadly? Last time Trump was elected they just doubled down on everything they were doing wrong in the first place (seemingly thinking they weren't doing it with enough zealous fervor), but they're looking comparatively deflated now. Many of these people will quietly change with the shifting times, but there are also a lot of people who have an interest in maintaining the social justice status quo, inasmuch as they can.
How does new leadership take up the mantle? Can genuine egalitarians who actually have an interest in art (as opposed to flattening the world and obsessing over simplistic identity categories) find their way back into the fold? Can we reform the institutions, or do we have to build new ones? Is anyone who has any capital interested in contributing to the latter, or are artists just left with the fickle attention economy, trapped between a "left" that's lost its goddamned mind and right wingers who don't have much interest in the arts in the first place?
These are indeed the questions to ask, though I won't pretend to have answers. I think that some institutions will give up and close, some will issue a statement like Ryan's and then backchannel with leadership about how to correct course, some will quietly go back to doing their jobs like the last four years didn't happen, and some, like Artforum, will double down on the doubling-down. All I can do is point out that the last option is deeply uncool.
Starting our own institutions would be healthy to do in any case.
I read the first passage you quoted by Ryan. I passed on the rest, as it was a waste of my time and patience to read the first. I hope she has use for her five degrees, but I have precisely zero use for her.
As for what Trump said about Haiti, I say that about Cuba, which was FAR better off than Haiti before it was rescued from capitalism (and actual progress) by a "revolutionary" bait-and-switch scam. If the shoe fits, it can be worn, unflattering though it may be. The shoe is not the problem--the fit is.
Adams apparently wants to have it both ways, or have his cake and eat it, too, which I do not respect, not least because it won't wash. However, that has never stopped plenty of people from trying to get away with it and never will, though it is ultimately self-defeating, not to say self-denying--in a bad way.
Inconsistency doesn't count against a manifesto. Adams, I think, is just a sentimental guy in a way that makes for good photography but not coherent politics. People should still read his book.
OK, but I still have a problem when there is even the slightest whiff of preaching or lecturing from a fashionably PC pulpit, which always rubs me the wrong way, because I'm apparently congenitally fashion-averse, generally speaking.
Well written.
Inasmuch as we're experiencing a "wreck" right now, who plunged our societal train into the abyss? As much as the people engaging in all of this want to deny it, eschewing class politics and obsessively embracing dogmatic, incurious, discriminatory identitarian frameworks along with an elitist and censorious attitude has real world effects.
It's unclear exactly what Trump season 2 is going to look like at this point - here's hoping some good things come out of it, but I'll be surprised if on an economic level it doesn't simply continue to tilt us towards the further empowerment of the super wealthy while things get worse for the rest of us - but how did we get here?
Seems to me that people like Ryan have been leading us in this direction for years. Their inability to self reflect and question the social justice ideology that has a hold of them, their unwillingness to examine the world at large as it is (if they ever even have to encounter it) and acknowledge the unintended consequences of the policies and diktats that they've ham fistedly imposed on the rest of us (in large part by terrorizing people into silence with cancel campaigns and convoluted rhetorical tricks) - all of this has managed to capture (and cripple) the Democratic Party to the point that they can't even beat a guy like Trump, who who wouldn't have been a challenging opponent for any party that wasn't deeply out of touch the first time around, and certainly shouldn't have been a problem this time, after he managed to make so many Americans hate him.
From here I wonder: how do we get people who've embraced identitarian social justice out of positions of power in the arts, and in institutions more broadly? Last time Trump was elected they just doubled down on everything they were doing wrong in the first place (seemingly thinking they weren't doing it with enough zealous fervor), but they're looking comparatively deflated now. Many of these people will quietly change with the shifting times, but there are also a lot of people who have an interest in maintaining the social justice status quo, inasmuch as they can.
How does new leadership take up the mantle? Can genuine egalitarians who actually have an interest in art (as opposed to flattening the world and obsessing over simplistic identity categories) find their way back into the fold? Can we reform the institutions, or do we have to build new ones? Is anyone who has any capital interested in contributing to the latter, or are artists just left with the fickle attention economy, trapped between a "left" that's lost its goddamned mind and right wingers who don't have much interest in the arts in the first place?
These are indeed the questions to ask, though I won't pretend to have answers. I think that some institutions will give up and close, some will issue a statement like Ryan's and then backchannel with leadership about how to correct course, some will quietly go back to doing their jobs like the last four years didn't happen, and some, like Artforum, will double down on the doubling-down. All I can do is point out that the last option is deeply uncool.
Starting our own institutions would be healthy to do in any case.
I read the first passage you quoted by Ryan. I passed on the rest, as it was a waste of my time and patience to read the first. I hope she has use for her five degrees, but I have precisely zero use for her.
As for what Trump said about Haiti, I say that about Cuba, which was FAR better off than Haiti before it was rescued from capitalism (and actual progress) by a "revolutionary" bait-and-switch scam. If the shoe fits, it can be worn, unflattering though it may be. The shoe is not the problem--the fit is.
Adams apparently wants to have it both ways, or have his cake and eat it, too, which I do not respect, not least because it won't wash. However, that has never stopped plenty of people from trying to get away with it and never will, though it is ultimately self-defeating, not to say self-denying--in a bad way.
Inconsistency doesn't count against a manifesto. Adams, I think, is just a sentimental guy in a way that makes for good photography but not coherent politics. People should still read his book.
OK, but I still have a problem when there is even the slightest whiff of preaching or lecturing from a fashionably PC pulpit, which always rubs me the wrong way, because I'm apparently congenitally fashion-averse, generally speaking.